Brilliance
by Teris24
Summary: Osaka has another moment of thought. This one doesn't have much to do with AzuDai as a series.


**Disclaimer: **I don't own any Azumanga Daioh characters.

**Note: **There's no point to this. It doesn't take place anywhere and it's not saying anything. Just something. I dunno.

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**Brilliance**

Ayumu Kasuga stood on the roof of the local police station. She was laughing, clutching a note in her right hand. The world was such an awfully funny place sometimes. On the sidewalk below her she could hear the collective screams of those unfortunate individuals who had somehow managed to survive this long.

Everything had been fine only five days ago. People lived contentedly in the comfortable patterns that they created for themselves with no attention paid to the unchanging quality of their surroundings. Each contributed in their own way to the construction of a complex system. They sacrificed willingly parts of themselves, their time and their money for the privilege of being able to contribute in the first place. No one ever looked up, nor did they look around. At first that had been their only mistake.

The building across the street had caught fire several hours ago. There were still people stranded on the roof, doing what they could to devise a means of escape. Ayumu smiled gently and raised her arm to wave at them. She was like them in a way.

Down in the street, a Honda careened around the corner of an intersection and smashed into a telephone pole. The stunned driver shoved his door open and bailed out as the hood of the car burst into flames. In one of his hands he was carrying a sawed off shot gun. Ayumu watched as a woman ran up to him and put her hands on the gun. The man tore the gun away from her grip, aimed, and shot her point blank in the face. The woman's head exploded into several pieces and her brain became nothing more than a chunky smear against the wall of the station behind her.

Ayumu looked down to the torn piece of paper in her hand. She had known, or at least someone had known, that what was happening was the inevitable outcome. The city was in an unbridled state of anomie after so many lifetimes spent on the creation of a purpose. The traditions of families, groups, the value of an individual as opposed to that of their affiliations, all reeked with the effluvia of a species trying to carve out a place for itself in a world that wasn't meant for its adaptations. People belonged only in what they constructed for themselves. Initially they had no instincts but the acquisition of language and their obsessive, paranoid desire to hold on to their presumptions about why they were there and able to acknowledge their own existence.

Out from the darkness, a lone mayfly fluttered down and alighted on the wall that lined the roof of the police station. Ayumu gazed at the fly and grinned softly. A mayfly's lifespan was twenty four hours. She wondered how many hours the fly had left before it died. Probably not many more than her own.

"Hey there…" she whispered, lifting her finger tip to brush against the edge of the insects wings. The mayfly didn't move as she expected it to. It must have been closer to death than she thought. She sighed and dropped her hand again. "You're so lucky…" Somewhere off in the distance a gas station exploded. Orange flames mushroomed up towards the sky where they ballooned and smoldered into a head of back smoke. The riot of people below her was beginning to grow thick with panic.

People were very different from mayflies. Mayflies had one day to live, and they spent that time doing nothing but searching for a mate to reproduce. They didn't even eat. Reproduction was the purpose of their lives, and there was no other purpose that they served other than to blacken windshields and turn sidewalks slippery with their dead bodies. Once they mated, they died, and the following season their eggs would hatch and their offspring would do the same thing. It was a blatant representation of a life continuum, and yet still there was no purpose. Mayflies contributed nothing to their surrounding world, excepting when they were taken as prey by birds and fish. One mayfly generation after another, living, reproducing, and dying. It had to have been leading up to something. The mayflies must have known something that nothing else did.

Ayumu would never discover the mayfly's secret. Discovery wasn't such a big deal anymore. As she stood there serenely, gazing up to the dotted night sky, it was hard to imagine the regression that was happening below her. There were no authority figures or governing decorum. There was no purpose. Any reason for continuation had been lost when the first riot broke out. At first it had only been a small episode, but then the number of participants skyrocketed from hundreds to thousands, and then to hundreds of thousands. Somewhere on the news she had heard reports of similar incidents happening in other cities.

Often times she had thought as she sat alone of what was really going on. Always she had been perfectly at ease, even though she knew that somewhere out in the world, someone was face to face with the fine line between ignorance and death. Someone would always be dying, bleeding, screaming at the top of their lungs, feeling trapped, or misunderstanding. There was no way to tell what it was all for. After giving herself several headaches over the matter, she had finally concluded that it was just the true cost of living.

Ayumu slipped out of her shoes and stepped up onto the wall. She was feeling good. Surprisingly good. She turned around to face her back to the street, raising her arms and holding them straight out to her sides. As she began to lean her weight backwards she looked back up to the sky. Everything happened for a reason. Whatever was happening now was just another step in a long, winding staircase. Unfortunately she wouldn't be around to see the next step. The city she lived in was gone and she had no choice but to go down with it. She would end herself gracefully because she, unlike the people across the street in the burning building, realized that this wasn't about her. There was no such thing as an individual anymore. People acted as a species, banding together to defend themselves against the threat of themselves.

She fell without a sound. Not even the weight of her body smashing into the concrete was important enough to emit a signal to let someone know that it had happened. Left on the roof of the police station, the note she had held in her hand teetered on the ledge where it had fallen. A week ago the note had been tucked under Ayumu's pillow. Scrawled across the faded notebook paper, in simple, unsteady handwriting someone had written in pencil the simple message that had changed everything in Ayumu's world.

"_You were right."_

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**Note:** Again, there's no point to this. Just a diversion from other things. 


End file.
